Original screenprints for sale

Online gallery Children’s Book Illustration have started selling some of my original screenprints. Six prints for The Girl with the Parrot on her Head (from the same editions as the prints used in the book) are available now – including a few of the soon-to-be-seasonal scootering spread.
Street screen print

Dulwich Books has a system

To celebrate the release of The Girl with the Parrot on her Head in paperback, the lovely Dulwich books have put Isabel and her system, and the WOLF in their window:Dulwich Books window
I am extremely grateful, again, for the amazing scalpel work performed on this display by the design team at Walker Books. Hmm, I wonder if I will get to design any monster windows when ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! is loosed in March…

Paperback parrot and delivering Hilda

The Girl with the Parrot on her Head is published in paperback today!
Paperback edition of The Girl with the Parrot on her HeadIn other newts, today I’m also taking the last bits of artwork for my third book, Hilda and the Runaway Baby, to Walker Books. Weyll, actually the endpapers will be the last bit and I haven’t finished them, but I can scan those myself.

I am a bit late delivering Hilda: I hadn’t really realised before I started making the screenprints how challenging this book would be. I’d already printed illustrations for half of the original version (made during my MA) but ended up re-doing everything, partly because we changed the format from portrait to landscape. There were one or two vignettes I could have kept but they were the easiest prints in the book (and besides, horrors – the wheels of the pram were unfeasibly small!).
So tiredWhat made it tricksy was the seven landscapes, all at different times of day and night, and the three village scenes, two of which had to be made at a tiny scale because of the size of my silkscreens. I am now much better at getting two eyes, a mouth and a nose onto a face the size of a lentil – but is this a transferable skill? If you need any bespoke personified lentils please do let me know. Here’s is a detail showing lentils printed yesterday (and Hilda, who I’m going to miss).
Detail of Hilda printHilda and the Runaway Baby will be published in 2017.

Good times for the parrot

Some exciting things have happened to my first book in recent weeks: there’s going to be a Danish edition, Pigen med papegøjen på hovedet, published by Jensen & Dalgaard in February 2016; I also heard that The Girl with the Parrot on her Head is a finalist in the Golden Pinwheel Young Illustrators Contest (which means the illustrations will be in an exhibition at Shanghai Children’s Bookfair this week) AND some lovely librarian has nominated it for, of all things, the Kate Greenaway Medal!
Paperback and Danish edition of The Girl with the Parrot on her Head

The UK paperback will be out in January, and Candlewick will publish the US hardback in April.

Family workshops at House of Illustration

House of Illustration have just published a guest blogpost I wrote for them about a workshop I ran there in May, based on The Girl with the Parrot on her Head. AND, I’ve been invited back to run another family workshop on 5th August with Becky Palmer, this time linked to their summer exhibition of Ladybird books, Ladybird by Design.
Ladybird BookWe’ll be asking: what if ladybirds had Ladybird books of their own? What would they be about? Heraldry? Leaves? Aphids? Microcomputers? How small would they be? Book online now and come and help us find out.